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Course Delivery

Assessment

Resubmit any failed elements and/or make good any missing elements. Where this involves re-submission of work, a new topic must be selected.

Learning Outcomes

On completion of this module students should typically be able to:

1. demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of the texts studied on the module, and a specialist knowledge of the broader critical and theoretical issues associated with the study of modern literature and consumer culture;

2. demonstrate this understanding and knowledge in an extended critical and analytical essay that makes reference to the cultural and historical contexts of the text(s) under review;

Aims

1. to provide a focused overview of literary responses to the rise of consumer culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries;

2. to locate these literary responses in their historical and cultural contexts;

3. to allow students to gain experience in the practical application of critical / cultural theory to the interpretation and analysis of texts.

Brief description

What is retail therapy? Why is shopping fun? Where does desire end and ideology begin in a world of mass consumption? Engaging with such questions, this module explores how writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sought to represent and come to terms with the rise of consumer culture. Moving through the naturalism of Emile Zola and Theodore Dreiser to the modernism of Joseph Conrad and Aldous Huxley, we will focus in particular on the impact of consumerism on narrative vision and literary practice.

_Seminar Programme

_1. The rise of consumer culture
Themes for discussion: what is consumerism? historical and social background, cultural conditions, material forms, literary responses.
Main text: David Hawkes, Ideology